Only Haitians can fix Haiti
In a tweet on X Sunday morning, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador commented on the hellish collapse of Haiti into a frenzy of murder, anarchy, and gang rule. “We can fix it,” Bukele wrote. “But we’ll need a UN [Security Council] resolution, the consent of the host country, and all the mission expenses to be covered,” he wrote.
If anyone in the region has the street cred to make such a claim, it would be Bukele, whose ferocious war on violent crime in his own country has reduced homicides by nearly 80 percent and pulverized the once-powerful street gangs that long terrorized Salvadorans. No longer is El Salvador the most dangerous nation in Latin America. But the price of Bukele’s crackdown has been a merciless assault on human rights and due process and the transformation of El Salvador into a police state. Civil liberties were suspended in 2022, and an estimated 75,000 people have been jailed. By American norms, Bukele’s authoritarian rule has been shocking. But he has become a hero to El Salvador’s citizens, who last month reelected him in a landslide.
Yet even the “world’s coolest dictator,” as Bukele likes to call himself, is not about to “fix” Haiti, with or without the United Nations’s blessing. What Haiti needs is not a fix-up but a gut rehab. And Haitians must find a way to do it for themselves, because no one else can do it for them.
Though Haiti has been an independent nation for 220 years, for most of the past century it has been ill-ruled and crime-ridden, plagued by endemic corruption, brutal despotism, and political dysfunction. Even against the background of its unhappy history, however, Haiti today has become something out of Dante’s Inferno.
A recent Washington Post dispatch from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, headlined “Haitians shot dead in street and there’s no one to take the corpses away,” conveys a sense of what Haiti has turned into.
“First came the smell — of something burning,” reported Widlore Mérancourt and Samantha Schmidt. “Then, the sight: a corpse, charred black, lying in the middle of street, its bones and feet sticking out of the pile of ash. … The streets of Port-au-Prince reek with the stench of the dead.”
Haiti has been trapped in a horror show since July 2021, when then-President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated. Since then, gangs have taken control of most of the country’s capital, which is now a hellscape of violent death, disease, and crippling shortages of fuel and medicines. Earlier this month, gunmen broke into Port-au-Prince’s two main prisons, setting 4,000 prisoners free. They opened fire on the airport, forcing its closure, and breached the city’s main shipping port. Haiti has no army that can maintain order and its national police force numbers just 9,000.
Several days ago Haiti’s embattled Prime Minister Ariel Henry flew to Kenya, hoping to muster support for a UNbacked multinational security force to stop the violence and suppress the gangs wreaking so much devastation. But once he was out of the country, his last tenuous shred of authority evaporated. Haiti’s top gangster demanded that Henry step down or “we’ll be heading straight for a civil war that will lead to genocide.” Henry said on Tuesday he would resign.
Not a single elected official holds office anywhere in Haiti. The country last voted in 2016 and its legislature has expired. There is no timetable for a new election.
Can Haiti emerge from this nightmare? The United States has pledged $100 million in relief funds and offered to provide airlifts and medical support. But it is not about to intervene militarily. The last American “intervasion,” ordered by Bill Clinton in 1994, failed to achieve its stated objective of restoring democracy and fizzled after just six month.
Nor is any new UN mission going to rescue Haiti, even assuming there were a responsible nation willing to undertake one. Previous Security Council deployments of “peacekeepers” to Haiti resulted in horrific scandals, from the sexual exploitation of Haitian women and girls to a ghastly cholera epidemic.
Haiti is broken. But there is no outside savior, no deus ex machina, that is going to swoop in and make things better. Perhaps some native populist leader may be able to emulate in Haiti, for better and for worse, what Bukele did in El Salvador. Perhaps a grass-roots movement can assemble and rise against the gangs that have made life in Haiti such a misery. The Haitian people do not lack for talent, drive, or imagination, as the success of Haitian immigrants in America and elsewhere attests.
A century of foreign meddling has not resolved Haiti’s endless crisis. It will not do so now. Haiti is in desperate shape, but the only people who can “fix it” are Haitians themselves.